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Susan Williams, Ph.D.

Williams remembers how, as a Ph.D. student, she really fell in love with anatomy: “It was in the anatomy lab where you see the back of the neck and throat, and I thought, ‘Wow! This is really neat anatomy.’”

Soon after, she found out that one of her anatomy instructors conducted research on mammalian chewing mechanics. The project resonated with her anatomical interests—how those jaw muscles, bones and joints actually work—and turned her on to functional morphology studies.

Last fall, with support from OU-COM, Williams opened OHIO’s Large Animal Comparative Biomechanics Research Facility, where she studies how feeding mechanisms develop in alpacas and other mammals. According to Williams, alpacas exhibit relatively slow skeletal and dental development—their last teeth erupt at age five or six—which greatly effects how they coordinate their jaw muscles.

Williams’ mastication studies have also taken her to Costa Rica to explore the feeding habits of howler monkeys, a project that required her to adapt electromyography (EMG) equipment for measuring muscle function to fit a very small, highly mobile research subject.

“Working with engineers, we had to miniaturize everything and make it portable,” she says. The study first received a “high-risk project” grant from the NSF and later, based on initial success, a full project grant.

“I’m an experimentalist at heart,” Williams says. “My research methods are driven by the questions that arise in my studies, and often there’s no precedent for how to answer them.”

This tenacious spirit translates into her gross anatomy instruction.

“The textbook may say ‘the masseter adducts (closes) the jaw,’ but I can help them to appreciate that together the jaw muscles also perform a number of other, very elaborate and highly controlled actions,” she says. “Research helps me be a more thorough teacher.”

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